Face the pain

Getting pregnant was really tough for me (for an ‘inspiring’ article, it definitely started out pretty sad) and one of the reasons was that I found unexplainable joy in making my family proud of me. I wasn’t always top of my class but seeing the look on my parents’ faces when I’d improve my grades or reach a target score in my tests always made me ecstatic! In truth, we were all raised differently and I don’t know the case in your home but the bottom line is that every child, in one way or another, craves the approval of their parent. The more I loved school, the better I’d perform and the more proud I’d feel like I made them. Then came the pregnancy and I just felt like everything I’d worked for for so long just blew away in the wind. And it crushed me!

After they knew about it, my dad reacted a lot calmer than I expected but my mum, not so much. I found her with tears in her eyes after dad told her (coz I didn’t know if I had the courage to tell my mum myself) and it broke me. Not so much that she felt disappointment, but that she thought that she may have done something wrong in her parenting to cause it. And that’s when the pain kicked in to add to the disappointment, shock and depression I was already feeling at the time. I had started losing friends really quickly because some just disappeared after the news got out and many of those that didn’t leave, I just shut out of from my life. I was skeptical about having friends for most of that time and I drew further and further into depressing isolation. The pain of losing friends, disappointing my family, and feeling like nothing more than a statistic of teenage pregnancy was overwhelming but I knew that I had to face it. I didn’t know how but I knew there was no other way to get over it.

Unfortunately, even after my daughter was born and I experienced joy and love I’ve never experienced before, I was still in a lot of pain from all that was going on simply because I never really faced it. I thought “Oh well, time heals all wounds” but the truth is, if you don’t make an intentional decision to make peace with the situation, it’ll take forever or never happen at all! Thankfully, a couple of years later (yes, the slowness I tell you), I got tired of all of it. The pain, bitterness, anger, depression and just chose to get past it. It didn’t happen in a day or a month but it slowly got better the more I made myself aware of how I feel and how tired I was of it.

What am I saying? Many times, like me, we hide behind the mask of strength and refusal to show the weakness and fragility of our hearts. We fail to acknowledge that the millstone on our necks weighing us down is slowly killing us. We smile and wave like we think we should and in our heads chant how okay were going to be but never really facing the fact that we are dying inside. The only true way to overcome that pain is to face it. Scream, shout, write (like me), talk, dance it out if you have to, but let it out. We can never TRULY see the green pastures on the other side unless we get the courage to face the pain.